grantmeaname wrote:Yeah! Flip, jbi, notfred, Forge and I are total dicks who foam at the mouth anytime a forum poster insinuates that anything other than linux is better than linux for any purpose.

... oh wait.

Indeed. Don't go characterizing me into a corner and denying me a good public frothing. I love to get my irrational rant on, especially in public. I also have a neckbeard! I regrettably never lived in my mother's basement, however. I do feel that's a failing of mine.

I have tired of keeping my Gentoo install afloat once again. I will soon be organizing several tester machines and installing and evaluating pretty much any/every linux distro that catches my eye. If there is interest, I may start a mega-thread or series of threads with my notes/impressions/etc of each and every distro I eval. Currently I'll be looking at Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, LMDE, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Arch Linux and possibly any others that catch my eye.

I'm going to be trying them out on at least one desktop and one laptop each. Ideal end-deployment targets are my Nehalem/Nvidia desktop machine and my Sandy Bridge/Intel X220 laptop. I may throw my HP Elitebook 8530p in there to get an ATI experience, as well. I'm curious how their closed and open source drivers are doing at the moment. The primary targets will be evaluating both BIOS and UEFI booting, as well. I'd like to transition to UEFI everywhere as soon as I can, for ease of multi-boot if nothing else, so that's a big criterion for me.

Mate is gnome 2, forked off and adjusted to Mint's design ideals. Cinnamon is gnome 3, forked and tweaked similarly.

As for your Dell, expect each release to be slightly slower, forever. Unless there's a major change in versions, you'll only suffer from creep. If your performance is getting low, you can try a lighter window manager. XFCE and LXDE are popular and light/fast.

MATE I believe is Gnome 2 based and Cinnamon Gnome 3. But I'm no expert, by any stretch.

I have been trying a few distro's on laptops recently, LMDE, Ubuntu 11 and 12, Fedora Core 16 and now 17 as well as OpenSUSE.. I don't know why I should choose any over the other on a technical level, I'm too nubish. I can only go with how they feel for me to use and whether it's a fight or not to use. Currently, my laptop that doesn't require heavy multitasking usage I run with FC17 and Gnome 3, it works. The laptop I actually tend to have lots of things going on with is currently setup with LMDE and Cinnamon. So far though, because I am primarily a Windows user the best user experience for me was OpenSUSE with KDE and I might switch back to that at some point.

Village wrote: I'm too nubish. I can only go with how they feel for me to use and whether it's a fight or not to use.

It's spelled "noobish", you noob!

I kid.

I'm actually having a hell of a time with my distro search at the moment. I was a KDE user back in the 2.X and early 3.X days, but left for Gnome around the time the 4.X betas. Now Gnome is getting all 21st century on me.

I've locked the door behind me, and am trying to force myself to learn KDE in kubuntu 12.04. I guess I've gotten old, because I just want to get back to the old Win95/OSX -like interface paradigm, but everyone else seems to be charging off into Unity, Metro, and other "task-based" clustermugs. Get off my lawn!

grantmeaname wrote:Yeah! Flip, jbi, notfred, Forge and I are total dicks who foam at the mouth anytime a forum poster insinuates that anything other than linux is better than linux for any purpose.

... oh wait.

That could be, I have not been paying much attention. So after you guys master the training wheel versions you might find Slackware to your liking, it just gives you choices which is different from what you have been talking about. It won't make them for you though.

What's the deal with strange window managers? What do they do, shine yer shoes? I just need something to launch my stuff and hold up the result. The little fast minimal ones are just fine. The bloated Gnome and KDE things are so glacial I quit using them long ago.

Ain't you a leet little thing. Everything was great with Slackware the last half dozen times I tried it, except for the self-important asshats among the user base. I'd take Gentoo's -O11 ricers over Slack's "lawl go back to AOL" any day, but truth be told, I'm not really interested in dealing with either.

When I'm not trying to understand these new generation WMs, I'm an XFCE user, thanks.

Forge wrote:Ain't you a leet little thing. Everything was great with Slackware the last half dozen times I tried it, except for the self-important asshats among the user base. I'd take Gentoo's -O11 ricers over Slack's "lawl go back to AOL" any day, but truth be told, I'm not really interested in dealing with either.

When I'm not trying to understand these new generation WMs, I'm an XFCE user, thanks.

Easy does it was just participating in the same manner, exposing an inner dickishness. Your chain pulls exceeding easy BTW.

Forge wrote:Ain't you a leet little thing. Everything was great with Slackware the last half dozen times I tried it, except for the self-important asshats among the user base. I'd take Gentoo's -O11 ricers over Slack's "lawl go back to AOL" any day, but truth be told, I'm not really interested in dealing with either.

When I'm not trying to understand these new generation WMs, I'm an XFCE user, thanks.

Easy does it was just participating in the same manner, exposing an inner dickishness. Your chain pulls exceeding easy BTW.

I was considering using a more moderate reply, or apologizing after I posted it, but I think we established each other's capacity for flame rather well.

I'm guessing you're another bitter and embittered long time Linux advocate, like me?

Forge wrote:I've locked the door behind me, and am trying to force myself to learn KDE in kubuntu 12.04. I guess I've gotten old, because I just want to get back to the old Win95/OSX -like interface paradigm, but everyone else seems to be charging off into Unity, Metro, and other "task-based" clustermugs. Get off my lawn!

Meh you'll be back to either Gnome or XFCE. I've tried to like KDE several times and every single time I've ended up back with Gnome. The last time I just took the hint with Suse 11.2. One day I came home and KDE had uninstalled itself.....completely. I had grub but everything else on the OS partition was gone. The other time yum .... well wasn't yummy because it stopped being able to install packages. The time before that I think Amarok 2 was deleting my music.

I couldn't figure out why more attention seemed to be paid towards creating options and less attention towards stability. There's that BeOS disk that I found within a Cracker Jack box... maybe that would have been more stable?? I just came to the conclusion that I'm not compatible with their design paradigm. My version of stable and their version are two different things and that's OK. People like it but I don't. I would if it would stop trying to assassinate my files.

I'll probably give up on KDE fairly soon. I want to like the whole gadget desktop plus 'plasmid' gadget thing, plus the weird semi-intelligent start menu thing... I really do. But it seems to be working against me. I got a similar vibe from Unity/Gnome 3. I just don't get it, and it terrifies me that that could be my fault.

kc77 wrote:Meh you'll be back to either Gnome or XFCE. I've tried to like KDE several times and every single time I've ended up back with Gnome. The last time I just took the hint with Suse 11.2. One day I came home and KDE had uninstalled itself.....completely. I had grub but everything else on the OS partition was gone.

Back when a couple of co-workers and I were dabbling with Fedora we observed it automagically uninstall the running kernel due to some sort of brain-dead dependency check gone awry. It asked if we were sure... but the prompt had a timeout... with a default choice of "yes"!

I don't think apt would ever do anything that brain-dead. At least, I've never seen it do anything that brain-dead!

Forge wrote:Mmmm, BeOS. I loved that horribly supported little OS. I got a similar vibe from Unity/Gnome 3. I just don't get it, and it terrifies me that that could be my fault.So not yet, but soon.

I would say Unity and Gnome 3/GS are vastly different. The reason I dislike Unity is because of the side panel, and specifically the Global Mac Menu. Unity does change the way you work because all of the menu elements are on that top bar ala Mac. With G3/GS the menu elements are still with the applications where they belong. That being said the overlay for either is hardly worth complaining over. It's a glorified start menu and nothing more. You can install a bottom panel for each which is what I did with G2 with all of your most used programs.

For all of the complaining though Unity or G3/GS are far more stable than KDE ever was during it's infancy.

just brew it! wrote:I don't think apt would ever do anything that brain-dead. At least, I've never seen it do anything that brain-dead!

I agree Apt is pretty good. I didn't know how good until I tried yum. That was an eye opening experience. "Dependency not found" Ok? Aren't you supposed to find it for me? Isn't that the whole point? Or it would just be defiant like it was mad at me because I didn't take it out to dinner. "Package cannot be installed". OK Why the hell not?

Fedora's yum/rpm package management system was a major factor in my decision to switch to Ubuntu. I hear Fedora's package management has gotten better, but I don't really see a reason to switch back, especially given the extended support cycle for the Ubuntu LTS releases. I prefer to have a main system that I keep on Ubuntu LTS Desktop, and a secondary system + VMs to mess around with other versions...

I'm not a terribly heavy user at the best of times. But other then the legacy, RPM hell I recall getting into when Fedora was still RedHat. I don't recall running into any issues with yum/rpm/apt-get/dpkg or whatever the distro/instructions tell me to type into the terminal over the last few releases I've played with. Though I do wonder what hell I'm unleashing on the system unbeknownst to me when I do install something from source and satisfy the dependencies myself.

Though we've run far afield from Linux Mint 13. Why should I choose this distro over any of the others?

bthylafh wrote:Call me when Slack gets a package manager that will handle dependencies as well as apt.

If one wants that sort of roll-your-own experience, might as well go with Arch; it's got better package management and the documentation's not bad.

I'm dithering between Arch and building up from Ubuntu Server for my next build.

Package manager ... yeah it's nothing like apt but I don't use packages all that much anyway. Once I have the libraries I need, which can be a bear sometimes, I just compile everything.

Still I have Debian 6.05 and I will throw that on a spare partition soon as I have run and enjoyed it before. That's where I first used apt although I have built a few Ubuntu boxes for people who wanted them.

Forge wrote:Ain't you a leet little thing. Everything was great with Slackware the last half dozen times I tried it, except for the self-important asshats among the user base. I'd take Gentoo's -O11 ricers over Slack's "lawl go back to AOL" any day, but truth be told, I'm not really interested in dealing with either.

When I'm not trying to understand these new generation WMs, I'm an XFCE user, thanks.

Easy does it was just participating in the same manner, exposing an inner dickishness. Your chain pulls exceeding easy BTW.

I was considering using a more moderate reply, or apologizing after I posted it, but I think we established each other's capacity for flame rather well.

I'm guessing you're another bitter and embittered long time Linux advocate, like me?

I was but I don't care much any more, I'm getting old. If the hoi polloi wants to play in the sewers I just let em' ... I do stand upwind though.

Village wrote:Though we've run far afield from Linux Mint 13. Why should I choose this distro over any of the others?

You get the stability and large userbase of Ubuntu, with Mate, a tweaked and still-supported Gnome 2 interface. If you think that Unity and Gnome Shell are steaming turds, Mint 13 is the closest you can get to your once-happy Ubuntu 10.10 installation. Mint has a couple of other tweaks, like a nice start menu and the mp3 codec installed by default, but those are teensy differences compared to the Mate/Unity/Gnome Shell choice.

I'm going to be trying them out on at least one desktop and one laptop each. Ideal end-deployment targets are my Nehalem/Nvidia desktop machine and my Sandy Bridge/Intel X220 laptop. I may throw my HP Elitebook 8530p in there to get an ATI experience, as well. I'm curious how their closed and open source drivers are doing at the moment. The primary targets will be evaluating both BIOS and UEFI booting, as well. I'd like to transition to UEFI everywhere as soon as I can, for ease of multi-boot if nothing else, so that's a big criterion for me.

You might want to look at Scientific Linux over CentOS. It has a better track record of pushing out patches in a timely manner, and I find it nicer over all. They are both RHEL clones, but SL does a little more then CentOS. Both distros are going to have software that lags behind something like Ubuntu or Fedora, since they emphasize stability over new code, but you'll be able to run an installation for 10 years before you'll need to upgrade to a new version.

Fedora does not play well with the proprietary Nvidia driver. It has a really nice nouveau driver setup, but the proprietary driver is a pain to get setup.

I don't have any recent ATI hardware or UEFI boards, so I can't comment on those two. I would check Phoronix for info on the state of video cards and drivers.

Forge wrote:Mmmm, BeOS. I loved that horribly supported little OS.

But it seems to be working against me. I got a similar vibe from Unity/Gnome 3. I just don't get it, and it terrifies me that that could be my fault.

I see there's another refugee on the forum.

It's not your fault. They've all made asinine design decisions, and some have taken then farther then others. Xfce is the only DE that I actually like. I can work with other DEs, but I don't necessarily like them and would do things differently.

I booted from the Mint CD today to do the installation, and so far I really like what I see. I don't feel the GUI at all, which is exactly what I need. And the system is very, very snappy.

The only downside is that the setup is noob oriented and simplified a little bit too much. I want to create an encrypted LVG based install, since this is a laptop and therefore I would like to add another layer of protection. And it seems I will have to do everything the hard way, creating partitions by hand, encrypting the PV, creating VG and logical partitions for the actuall OS install.

I've been thinking of becoming a little more security-oriented with my laptop (only PC) as it'll start to have meaningful financial information on it in a couple of years. If you find a good how-to about it, could you post it here? My gu-fu is failing me.

grantmeaname wrote:I've been thinking of becoming a little more security-oriented with my laptop (only PC) as it'll start to have meaningful financial information on it in a couple of years. If you find a good how-to about it, could you post it here? My gu-fu is failing me.

But it doesn't work for Mint as there is no alternate iso. I have found few articles, but they all differ. Common phrases are lvm2 LUKS dm-crypt, but details are way to different, so I'm still trying to understand why.

grantmeaname wrote:Could you install Mate onto Ubuntu, or is there something else you need from Mint? Or would that break something in Ubuntu/not work optimally?

You can install MATE onto Ubuntu, in fact it's pretty easy to sidegrade from any Ubuntu install onto the equivilent Mint version.

Being as the Mint installer doesn't properly support LUKS/encrypt, I'd install with an encrypted disk setup from Ubuntu media, and sidegrade onto Mint. Seems to be the best way to get to where you want to go.

Madman wrote:I want to create an encrypted LVG based install, since this is a laptop and therefore I would like to add another layer of protection. And it seems I will have to do everything the hard way, creating partitions by hand, encrypting the PV, creating VG and logical partitions for the actuall OS install.

A lot of information to study...

Setting up encrypted partitions is easy in Fedora, and I've been tempted to do it a number of times. The problem is it requires a password on boot. I'd much rather have an option where I need to plug in a flash drive, smart card, or something.

I usually just create an encrypted folder with Cryptkeeper if I need to store sensitive stuff.

Somewhat off-topic, but what non-Unity version of Ubuntu would people say has the best multi-monitor support? I've been using Lubuntu/LXDE which requires mucking around with X server settings everytime I connect a projector or monitor in order to extend/clone it. I'm just looking for a faster/cleaner method of doing this and Ubuntu's Unity configures the attached screen immediately when connected. Would, say, XFCE, Gnome, or something else work better in this regard than LXDE? (i.e. Behave a bit more like Unity, but isn't Unity since I don't really like it.)

One of the main reasons I ask is because I don't want to actually have to hopscotch around different desktop environments on my Lubuntu installations, nor have to burn a pile of disks to see exactly how each one works.

Last edited by C-A_99 on Wed Jun 06, 2012 5:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

C-A_99 wrote:Somewhat off-topic, but what non-Unity version of Ubuntu would people say has the best multi-monitor support? I've been using Lubuntu/LXDE which requires mucking around with X server settings everytime I connect a projector or monitor in order to extend/clone it. I'm just looking for a faster/cleaner method of doing this and Ubuntu's Unity configures the attached screen immediately when connected. Would, say, XFCE, Gnome, or something else work better in this regard than LXDE? (i.e. Behave a bit more like Unity, but isn't Unity since I don't really like it.)

One of the main reasons I ask is because I don't want to actually have to hopscotch around different desktop environments on my Lubuntu installations, nor have to burn a pile of disks to see exactly how each one works.

In my experience, Gnome2 was pretty easy to configure with multiple screens (used it to play video on an s-video port, got the thinkpad keyboard button to change screen configs working easily). So I'd guess Mate would be the same.